开发商降价引抗议，楼市低迷拖累中国经济Empty Homes and Protests: China’s Property Market Strains the World

来源：纽约时报 2019-01-03 04:59

JURONG, China — For Hu Peiliang, Jurong was a city of cranes, concrete and opportunity. He was so sure it was on the cusp of a boom that last year he moved his family there.

中国句容——对于胡培亮来说，句容是一座起重机、混凝土与机遇交织的城市。去年，他非常确定这里正处于经济繁荣的顶峰，于是把家搬到了那里。

On an overcast day last month, Mr. Hu, a 31-year-old real estate agent, pointed to one new building after another as evidence. New city blocks have been built, crosswalks and streetlights erected overnight. One development straddling several blocks called Yudong International will include 120 buildings when completed.

But who will buy all those apartments? Mr. Hu paused before answering. “I was wondering that myself,” he said. Since July, he has sold only a handful.

但是这么多公寓谁会买呢？胡培亮在回答之前停顿了一下。“我也在想这个问题，”他说。自7月以来，他只卖出了几处房子。

Unwanted apartments are weighing on China’s economy — and, by extension, dragging down growth around the world. Property sales are dropping. Apartments are going unsold. Developers who bet big on continued good times are now staggering under billions of dollars of debt.

“The prospects of the property market are grim,” said Xiang Songzuo, a senior economist at Renmin University, said during a lecture at Renmin Business School this month.

“房地产的消费也在大幅下降，”中国人民大学的资深经济学家向松祚本月在人民大学商学院的一次演讲中表示。

“The property market is the biggest gray rhino,” he said, referring to a term the government has used to describe visibly big problems in the Chinese economy that are disregarded until they start gaining momentum.

“房地产就是最大的‘灰犀牛’，”他说。政府用这个词来形容中国经济中明显存在却没有受到重视，直到其发展势头越来越猛的重大问题。

China is grappling with an economic slowdown brought on by efforts to curb debt and worsened by the trade fight with the United States. But any solution will have to contend with the country’s property problems. More than one in five apartments in Chinese cities — roughly 65 million — sit unoccupied, estimates Gan Li, a professor at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu.

“We are already in a difficult economic situation,” Mr. Gan said. “The decline will only get worse.”

“本来就处在经济困境的情况下，”甘犁说。“下滑会更加严重。”

In places like Jurong, homeowners are paying the price. Some property developers have slashed prices on new apartments to gin up business or cut corners to save money. That undercuts the property values of earlier buyers, who increasingly are taking to the streets to protest.

In October, dozens of apartment buyers in Jurong gathered outside the sales office of Center Park, a 22-building residential complex pitched by Country Garden, the developer, as China’s version of Central Park in Manhattan. Security guards barricaded the entrance to prevent protesters from storming the building to demand their money back.

“I am very angry,” said Jia Rui, 24, who bought a Center Park apartment a year ago. He watched last year as property prices rose for months before deciding to buy the apartment, which will be bigger than the one he currently lives in with his wife and parents. When he learned that similar apartments were later being sold at nearly half the price, Mr. Jia said, he felt helpless.

“It is not possible to get a refund,” Mr. Jia said. Then again, he added, Jurong will have a subway line connecting it to Nanjing, a major city, by 2023. “Maybe the price will go back up by then,” he said.

“退房是不可能的了，”贾睿说。他还说，到2023年，句容将有一条地铁线路通往大城市南京。“也许那个时候价格会再涨上去，”他说。

China’s property market has long been a wild ride, driven by speculation from property developers and home buyers alike and made worse by government efforts to tame prices if they get too high and juice sales if they get too low. The current slowdown stems in large part from a three-year building spree driven by a surge in prices in many cities. Officials struggled to contain a white-hot property market with measures that included open consideration of a national property tax.

Housing is key to China’s well-being. It accounts for roughly one-fifth to one-third of China’s economic growth, depending on whether ancillary industries like construction and furniture-making are included. Property is the largest source of wealth for households, a given in a country with strict rules against moving money overseas and a volatile stock market. In major cities, it sometimes accounts for as much as 85 percent of a family’s assets, according to researchers at Southwestern University.

That store of wealth is looking increasingly shaky. Sales in terms of gross floor area on the market have dropped sharply since September. The share of apartments in new developments that are being sold has plunged since the summer. The number of failed land auctions has doubled this year, indicating that property developers are unwilling or unable to buy land for new developments.

Now people are angry, and Chinese officials and property developers are doing something about it. Officials tried various measures to take steam out of the market last year and are now reversing some of them.

现在人们很愤怒，中国的官员和房产开发商在设法应对。去年，官员们尝试了各种措施给市场降温，如今又在扭转其中一些措施。

In recent months, they have loosened mortgage requirements, eased restrictions on when homeowners can resell their properties and made it easier for university students to continue living in the cities where they are studying after they graduate, potentially increasing housing demand. In some cities, property developers have cut deals with home buyers to give them back the difference between the current price and the one they originally paid.

As housing prices begin to fall — in some cities by as much as they did during the depths of the global financial crisis in 2009 — some buyers have made their displeasure known. Jurong, a small city by Chinese standards of 600,000 people about a 45-minute drive from Nanjing, has experienced at least six protests alone in recent months.

Jurong represents a bet by home buyers that a buoyant market in Nanjing, a former Chinese capital and one of its more picturesque cities, will spread to surrounding areas. Many home buyers are retired workers or farmers who have moved to the city from the surrounding countryside.

句容代表着购房者的一个赌注：中国古都、风景如画的城市之一南京将延伸到周边地带。很多购房者是从周边农村搬来城市的退休工人或农民。

Today the city appears to be preparing for a future in which its population more than doubles. There are 19 other projects like Center Park.

如今，这座城市似乎在为未来人口翻倍做着准备。像中央公园这样的项目还有19个。

Country Garden, the developer behind Center Park and other residential complexes around the country, has endured slumping sales and has slashed prices. It has faced fury from buyers, some of whom have taken to smashing in the windows of sales offices in at least one city, according to the local news media, which posted images and video. In a written statement, Country Garden said fluctuating home prices were “a normal market phenomenon” and said it would “make proper arrangements” to assuage angry home buyers.

Hu Peiliang, the real estate agent in Jurong, and his friend Wang Liwei were selling homes in Nanjing before they decided to make the move to Jurong. If prices were so high in Nanjing, it seemed only logical to both men that prospective buyers who were unable to afford a place there — or who were locked out of the market because of residential restrictions — would look to Jurong. The government’s plan to build a metro system made the city even more appealing.

At first they were right. In 2016, some 49,000 apartments were sold in Jurong, a remarkable number for a city where the annual average is closer to 4,000, according to Huifeng Li, a research director at the Purple Mountain Digital New Media Research Institute in Nanjing. The majority of the new buyers these days are speculators, he said.

Mr. Hu added: “Mostly it’s buyers who are looking for investments who come here. They see opportunities here.”

胡培亮补充说，“多数是为了投资买房的。他们看好这里。”

Hundreds of buildings sprang up, offering a glimpse of a future bustling city. Now, these partly constructed buildings have more of a ghost town feel.

成百上千座高楼涌现，你可以瞥见未来一座熙熙攘攘的城市。眼下，这些部分建成的楼房更多是一种鬼城的感觉。

At the Center Park development site, green netting drapes over a dozen half-built apartment buildings, construction cranes on top of each. Men with white gloves stand at the sales office, from which soft jazz music is playing, waiting to greet prospective buyers. But there are few customers, and the greeters mostly look bored.